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Windows 11 24H2 brings in a bunch of new features, and one of them is faster ('checkpoint') cumulative updates, with Microsoft outlining just how much nippier such upgrades have got with the new version of its desktop OS.

In a blog post, Steve DiAcetis, Principal Program Manager Lead at Microsoft, explains that version 24H2 brings in both quicker installation of updates, and swifter post-installation reboots, alongside reductions in CPU resource usage during an upgrade.

How much of a speed boost are we looking at? Microsoft demonstrates a test scenario of a Windows 11 24H2 PC on the February 2024 security base image being upgraded to the March security update.

AMD Ryzen 9800X3D leaks just keep on springing - the chip is like a watering can at this point - but the latest one gives us all the juicy details we've been speculating about, performance-wise, in theory straight from the mouth of Team Red.

VideoCardz has turned up a marketing slide from AMD which describes the key points of the Ryzen 9800X3D and that includes the generational gaming boost we'll get, clock speed info, and more.

So, the big one - how much better is the Ryzen 9800X3D going to be compared to the Ryzen 7800X3D for gaming? If this marketing material is genuine, AMD says the new 9800X3D will be 8% faster in PC games (though we don't get to hear the extent of the benchmarking that led to this figure, this is just a headline summary).

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the US government agency designed to protect American consumers against illegal business practices, has changed its guidelines to target AI-generated content.

Since the rise of AI-generation tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, or simple image-generation tools such as DALLE, internet users have been enduring the rise of AI-generated content. While this is typically fine, as most of the content is interesting images or videos on social media timelines, there is a real problem when it comes to posting a review for a product or service when AI created it. The FTC's new guidelines are designed to protect consumers against businesses intentionally trying to mislead consumers.

An example of this would be a business that uses AI tools to create fake reviews or testimonials for products. These AI-generated reviews would then be published all over the listing for the product and would mislead potential buyers into thinking the product is more reliable than it actually might be. More specifically, the new FTC guidelines list fake reviews attributed to people who don't exist or someone that overstates their level of experience with the product as a particularly egregious offence.

Ubisoft is reportedly moving developers over to begin work on a Rayman Remake, according to a new report from Insider Gaming.

The news of a potential Rayman Remake comes only a day after another Insider Gaming report claimed Ubisoft had disbanded the Ubisoft Montpellier team following Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown failing to meet internal sales predictions. Yesterday's report stated that Ubisoft decided to disband the team only a few weeks after The Lost Crown launched. Insider Gaming states that at least some Montpellier team members have moved across to the Rayman project.

According to sources "close to the situation" the new Rayman Remake is codenamed "Project Steambot" and is being developed mostly by a team at Ubisoft Milan. Furthermore, the publication states that Michel Ancel, the creator of Rayman, is on board with the project as a consultant, which has some fans of the franchise worried, considering the controversy he was in back in 2020. As for the developers of The Lost Crown, the publication writes that at least twelve of them have moved over to work on the Rayman Remake.

Most gamers only really care about how many frames per second their graphics card can push at what graphical settings, but what GPUs and the impressive number-crunching technology insider is capable of much more than just hitting maximum frame rates in games.

Perhaps a more unusual example of the power of a GPU comes from a former NVIDIA engineer who has decided to use a NVIDIA A100 GPU to discover what is now considered to be the largest prime number. According to a new report from The Register, the new prime number has been named "M136279841," and it's equal to the monstrous number that is 2 to the power of 136,279,841 - 1. For those interested, the Great Internet Mesrsenne Prime (GIMPS) Search has a ZIP file containing a text file that has every single one of the 41,024,320 digits.

The download size of the file, or the largest prime number ever discovered, is just shy of 20MB at 18.3MB, which is substantially large for a text file. Former NVIDIA engineer Luke Durant has spotted what is called the 52nd Mersenne prime, which is a prime number that equals 2n - 1. According to the report, the last time a Mersenne prime was discovered was by Patrick Laroche more than five years ago, who found it by running the free GIMPS software on a four-core Intel Core i5-4590T processor over 12 days.

Fallout: London is a fan-made expansion-sized mod for Fallout 4 that shifts the action to post-apocalyptic London, England. With new locations, factions, weapons, and a fully-voiced campaign, it's a project we've been following alongside countless Fallout fans for some time.

Well, maybe not countless, as the ambitious mod and single-player game from Team FOLON has surpassed the 1 million player milestone, making it one of the most successful mod releases ever. Not only that, but due to the size and complexity of the mod, releasing it exclusively via GOG has also made it one of the platform's most successful releases in terms of reach.

Fallout: London is exclusive to PC, but its success highlights the franchise's popularity. There hasn't been a mainline single-player Fallout game since 2015, and with Bethesda focused on Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6, it could be several years before we see another official game in the franchise.

The HBM memory business is expected to continue to explode throughout 2025, with experts predicting the HBM market will grow 156% in 2025 to reach $46.7 billion... a market worth just $18.2 billion in 2024.

At the TrendForce Roadshow Korea held in Seoul last week, senior vice president of research operations at TrendForce, Avril Wu, said she expects to see the global HBM memory chip business to expand by 156% next year to $46.7 billion, up from $18.2 billion this year. HBM memory chip share of the overall DRAM market is expected to rise up to 34% in 2025, up from 20% in 2024.

NVIDIA's new Blackwell AI chips are the driving force behind ultra-fast HBM memory, with TrendForce noting that major AI solution providers will witness a "significant shift" in HBM specification requirements towards HBM3E, with the boost to HBM3E 12-Hi stack products, and will increase the HBM capacity per chip.

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook responded to the lukewarm response to the company's Vision Pro mixed reality headset and how the $3,499 price (for the base model with 256GB of storage) has impacted the device's appeal.

"At $3,500, it's not a mass-market product," said Cook. "Right now, it's an early-adopter product. People who want to have tomorrow's technology today - that's who it's for." Although enthusiasts with $3,500 to burn on an impressive mixed-reality headset picked one up on day one, sales for the Vision Pro have fallen below expectations.

The headset not only failed to ship 100,000 units in the first three months of its release, but sales have continued to slow. Apple's not backing out of the headset market, as several rumors are pointing to Apple developing a more affordable Vision Pro for 2025. However, a new report over at The Information (via Mac Rumors) is now saying Apple is winding down production on its first-gen Vision Pro - and production could stop completely before the end of 2024.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has addressed the issues surrounding its latest Blackwell AI chip, admitting that there was a design flaw that was "100% NVIDIA's fault" and that TSMC helped them through the tough Blackwell AI GPU launch.

NVIDIA initially unveiled its new Blackwell chips at GTC 2024 earlier this year in March, expected to ship in Q2 2024 but were delayed (as you can see in the stories below) which could've affected big-paying customers like Meta, Microsoft, and Google.

Huang said: "We had a design flaw in Blackwell. It was functional, but the design flaw caused the yield to be low. It was 100% NVIDIA's fault. In order to make a Blackwell computer work, seven different types of chips were designed from scratch and had to be ramped into production at the same time".

Well, that's one way to put it... "Copilot+ is a flop" and that Microsoft rebranding Copilot as "agents" is the company in "panic mode" says the CEO of Salesforce.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff posted some fightin' words on X just now, where he said: "Microsoft rebranding Copilot as 'agents'? That's panic mode. Let's be real-Copilot's a flop because Microsoft lacks the data, metadata, and enterprise security models to create real corporate intelligence. That is why Copilot is inaccurate, spills corporate data, and forces customers to build their own LLMs. Clippy 2.0, anyone? Meanwhile, Agentforce is transforming businesses now".

I mean, he's not wrong. I've had a bunch of Copilot+ laptops come through my lab in the last couple of months, and I've been brutally honest: NPUs are virtually useless. They're wasted space of silicon when we could have more Performance cores, more 3D V-Cache, more cache in general, just something... useful.

NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop GPU is rumored to be 45% to 65% faster than the RTX 4080 Laptop GPU according to new leaks.

In a new video from Moore's Law is Dead, sources told him that the GB203 GPU that will find its way into the GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop GPU should feature 8000+ CUDA cores and 16GB of next-gen GDDR7 memory. Don't worry, that's not the fastest mobile Blackwell GPU... that'd be the GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU that should rock (an insane) 24GB of GDDR7.

The purported RTX 5080 Laptop GPU being leaked here is based on a heavily cut-down GB203 GPU, but MLID expects the RTX 5080 Laptop GPU to be "way stronger" than the RTX 4080 Laptop GPU. We're looking at the next-gen RTX 5080 Laptop GPU being 45% to 65% faster than the RTX 4080 Laptop GPU, which is a huge deal for 2025 gaming laptops.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, isn't happy with the state of PC hardware right now: calling out "buggy hardware" from tech giants Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD.

In a new post on kernel.org, Torvalds said: "Honestly, I'm pretty damn fed up with buggy hardware and completely theoretical attacks that have never actually shown themselves to be used in practice. So I think this time we push back on the hardware people and tell them it's *THEIR* damn problem, and if they can't even be bothered to say yay-or-nay, we just sit tight".

He added: "Because dammit, let's put the onus on where the blame lies, and not just take any random "...." from bad hardware and say "oh, but it *might* be a problem".

Arm has reportedly canceled a licensing agreement with Qualcomm that gives the company the ability to design chips on the Arm chip standard, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

The specific licensing agreement is called the architecture license agreement (ALA), and it's a key component of an ongoing legal battle between the two tech giants. Reports indicate that Arm's cancelation of the agreement could significantly impact Qualcomm's business, especially considering the recent expansion the company has made into AI-powered laptops and if Arm forces Qualcomm to halt all development of chips based on its architecture. Bloomberg's report states Arm issued a 60-day notice to Qualcomm as legally required.

The legal battle between Arm and Qualcomm began when Arm accused Qualcomm and Nuvia of violating licensing agreements and infringing on its trademark after Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in 2021. Arm alleges the violation occurred when Qualcomm didn't renegotiate its agreements with Arm after it took over Nuvia and that Nuvia designs created before the merger should have been destroyed. However, Qualcomm argues that its existing agreement with Arm covers any developments made by Nuvia.

Google's future-gen Pixel 11 family of smartphones will use a next-gen Tensor G6 processor built on TSMC's new 2nm process node, with the Tensor G6 codenamed "Malibu".

Spotted by Android Authority contributor Mishaal Rahman, who spotted the codenames of the Tensor G5 and Tensor G6 processors. Tensor G4 powers the Pixel 9 family of smartphones, right up to the Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro Fold, while the next-gen Tensor G5 chip will power next year's Pixel 10 family, up to the Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro Fold.

After that, Google will unleash its future-gen Tensor G6 processor that will be inside of the Pixel 11 smartphones, up to the next-gen Pixel 11 Pro and Pixel 11 Pro Fold smartphones. Google will have its new Tensor G6 chip made by TSMC on its new 2nm process node, which will provide performance improvements and improved energy efficiency.

ORIGIN PC has just unveiled its new custom high-performance workstation laptops with the introduction of the NSL-14 and NSL-16 laptops, both powered by Intel's new Core Ultra 7 processor.

Inside, both the ORIGIN PC NSL-14 and NSL-16 workstation laptops feature the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor with 8 cores and 8 threads @ up to 4.8GHz (no Hyper-Threading here). There's up to 32GB of LPDDR5X memory inside, and up to 8TB of Gen4 SSD goodness in the NSL-14, while the bigger NSL-16 can handle up to 16TB of SSD storage.

The ORIGIN PC NSL-14 features a 14-inch 1200p (1920 x 1200) resolution display at only 60Hz (a huge downside, even though it's a workstation laptop, 120Hz would've been nice to see) while the NSL-16 features a bigger 16-inch display at 1600p (2560 x 1600) and a smoother 144Hz refresh rate.

ASUS has just joined the Thunderbolt 5 add-in card (AIC) party with the introduction of its new ASUS ThunderboltEX 5 AIC, right after GIGABYTE announced its new Thunderbolts 5 AIC.

The new ASUS ThunderboltEX 5 AIC has a single 6-pin PCIe power connector, with ASUS claiming it has USB-PD support of up to 130W through an in-house feature ASUS calls Flexible FastCharge. A single USB Type-C port is limited to a maximum of 96W, which will handle an Apple MacBook Pro laptop but not other laptops that are 100W+ power.

Inside, ASUS is using the same Intel JHL9580 Thunderbolt 5 controller that powers the GIGABYTE Thunderbolts 5 AIC, as well as using a PCIe 4.0 4 interface with support for up to 3 x DisplayPort 2.1-based 8K monitors at 60Hz refresh rate, but ASUS underlines that this will require DSC (Display Stream Compression) technology.

Micron has just announced its new 9550 PCIe Gen5 E1.S data center SSDs have been added to the NVIDIA recommended vendor list (RVL) for the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 AI system and its derivatives.

The company announced today that the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 uses the GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip to deliver "rack-scale, energy-efficient AI infrastructure", while the enablement of PCIe Gen5 storage in the system makes the Micron 9550 SSD an "ideal fit for optimizing performance and power efficiency in AI workloads like large-scale training of AI models, real-time trillion-parameter language model inference and high-performance computing (HPC) tasks".

Compared with other industry offerings, the 9550 SSD delivers up to 34% higher throughput for NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect (GDS) and up to 33% faster workload completion times in graph neural network (GNN) training with Big Accelerator Memory (BaM). The Micron 9550 SSD saves energy and sets new sustainability benchmarks by consuming 81% less SSD energy per 1TB transferred than other SSD offerings with NVIDIA Magnum IO GDS and up to 43% lower SSD power in GNN training with BaM.

Intel's next-gen flagship Core Ultra 9 285K processor reportedly loses to the previous-gen Core i9-14900K and Core i9-13900K processors... but also even the mid-range previous-gen AMD Ryzen 7 7700X in gaming according to new leaks.

In a new video from leaker Moore's Law is Dead, who has talked to multiple Tech YouTubers and tech reviewers about Intel's new Arrow Lake CPU architecture in general, and how the performance of the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K processor falls against its previous-gen counterparts, and its competitors CPUs.

Tom from MLID says that some of his sources said their review data has the Core Ultra 9 285K flagship Arrow Lake-S desktop processor losing to AMD's previous-gen, mid-range Ryzen 7 7700X chip in gaming... sheesh. He points out that there will be reviews where Arrow Lake wins over Zen 5 by something like 1-10% on average, while other reviews will see Arrow Lake taking the knee to Zen 5 because it "doesn't win consistently at anything".

AMD's Ryzen 9800X3D has been one of the hottest tech tickets in recent times on the rumor mill, and that heat won't be dissipated in any measure by the appearance of product listings for the next-gen 3D V-Cache workhorse CPU, as retailers (inevitably) jump the gun.

We already have confirmation from AMD that Ryzen 9000X3D is set to arrive on November 7, and the rumor peddlers out there are pretty certain that the sole chip to kick off the next-gen X3D range will be the 9800X3D. In theory, AMD should have a reveal in the works for later this week, on October 25 - tellingly the day after Intel's Arrow Lake desktop silicon goes on sale (the first 'K' models anyway).

VideoCardz spotted early pre-release product listings for the Ryzen 9800X3D highlighted by a couple of regular leakers on X, namely @harukaze5719 and @momomo_us, which you can see above and below. Note that the product listing linked below, for TechAmerica, has now been yanked offline, but the BLT listing (above) remains (at least at the time of writing, it may well eventually disappear too).

The upcoming Blackwell "GB203" GPU die has been leaked, the GPU that should power NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 5080 desktop graphics card, and the RTX 5090 Laptop GPU and RTX 5080 Laptop GPU. Check it out, in all its TSMC 4nm glory:

In a new video, leaker Moore's Law is Dead has posted a purported GB203 die shot which will power the second-fastest Blackwell desktop gaming GPU -- the GeForce RTX 5080 -- and what will be the two best discrete GPUs inside of laptops in 2025: the GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU and the GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop GPU. We'll also have next-generation GDDR7 memory across the board.

This is just a leak, so the GB203 GPU die that we're looking at might not be 100% making its way into the RTX 5080, or the RTX 5090 Laptop + RTX 5080 Laptop GPUs, it could very well make it into a laptop-focused Blackwell-based workstation GPU. We only have a couple of months to wait until we get some confirmation, probably weeks at this rate.